It has always been fascinating for me to explore the psychology of people’s relationships with each other and with the outside world, to give shape to human emotions. To take joy, despondency, indifference, rapture and jealousy to pieces. Feelings are abstract, therefore it is so interesting to look for and find the form of their visualization.

My face and body are the main instruments I use to incarnate the images I want. Standing in front of the camera as a model, I follow the age-old theatrical practice of playing roles. It gives impetus to the development of my own manner of narration. A part of my work, shooting is akin to a theatrical performance, where an urge to tell the viewer about emotions and feelings manifests itself through the characters in dialogues with the audience.

A passion for classical art and interest in everything new – technology, discoveries, experiments – led me to the type of mixed media, with which I work. From painting, I take colors and create air as an element of space. Reality and character I take from photography. My style originates from a long artistic tradition – collage. That is how my characters and spaces come together. At the next stage, I choose a brush of a graphics program. This is a subtle and accurate tool to create a light, weightless atmosphere similar to that of a dream.

In my creative work, I am not searching for the subjects of thought. They spring from everyday life and observations of the people around. Choosing a motif for my exploration, I offer the audience a female view on things, which concern me. Undoubtedly, this view is based on feminist principles. Yet, the matter is not in confrontation, but in balance and harmony, where a woman is not an object, but foremost – energy.

Biography

Early on Katerina Belkina knew about her exceptional talent to see the world through different eyes. Born in Samara in the southeast of European Russia, she was brought up in an creative atmosphere by her mother, a visual artist. Her education as painter at the Art Academy and from 2000 at the School for Photography of Michael Musorin in Samara gave her the tools to visualize her ideas. Exhibitions of her sublime, mystic self-portraits ensued in Moscow und Paris. In 2007 Katerina Belkina was nominated for the prestigious Kandinsky Prize (comparable to the British Turner Price) in Moscow. Recently she got the Hasselblad Masters Prize. Currently she lives and works in Berlin.